Principal Research Scientist Jobs

Company Overview Plastic is one of the most important inventions of the last century. They were intended to be useful, cheap, and durable. But right now, they are leaking into every aspect of our lives, threatening our food supply, harming wildlife, piling up in landfills, and degrading human health. This is because plastics were designed to have linear life cycles, where resins derived from raw materials are manufactured into products, used, and discarded with extremely short average useful lifespan (from minutes to days) as compared to their degradation lifetime (of tens to hundreds of years). In addition, demands for customization and complexity has led to further contamination in the waste stream. Recycling helps to fix the leak of overproduction and can be an effective way to reduce post-manufacturing and post-consumer waste. Current recycling solutions, however, are inadequate. To stop the leak, we need fixes from the source, which requires materials designed to be useful, durable and recyclable. Through coordinated effort with material suppliers, brands, manufacturers, and industry partners, we can extend the useful lifetime of waste indefinitely. FLO is looking to grow a team of ‘recycling warriors’ with a shared passion of making our vision of circular economy, a reality. FLO Materials is commercializing a new polymer platform (PDKs) that enables recyclability for products that are currently challenging to recycle. PDKs are cross-linked polymers that can be mechanically reprocessed like thermoplastics due to their dynamic nature and chemically recycled to regain their original monomers. FLO’s chemical recycling process is modular and can be co-located with manufacturers to decrease emission and increase supply chain resilience. Our chemical recycling technology allows plastics to be recycled at low energy and high recycling yield, where we can easily extract color and other additives during recycling, create new network polymers with different additives, and repeat this process infinitely at no detriment to the resulting polymers’ mechanical and aesthetic properties. Our polymer platform can be used to produce films and sheets, fibers and textiles, adhesives, composites, elastomers, and many other high-value materials. This infinitely recyclable network of polymers will enable sustainable manufacturing, increase materials efficiency, and facilitate the transition to a more circular plastics economy. FLO is building next-gen materials and the recycling platform to be both the beginning and end of a product’s life. We are passionate about enabling sustainable product design and we are really excited about helping consumers, brands, and their manufacturing partners achieve zero waste, easily and profitably, without compromising design. The company is located at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab with the technical founder as part of the Activate Fellowship. We need all hands-on deck now, join us in building the future of circular plastics. Position Overview FLO Materials is seeking a full-time senior scientist with expertise in organic synthesis and polymer formulation to head the R&D team. You will be responsible for planning internal R&D initiatives, mapping the formulation space for new recyclable materials, establishing structure-to-property relationships for covalent adaptive networks through fundamental mechanism studies and developing key metrics for monitoring material optimization and process development. As an early member of our team, you will have a unique opportunity to shape the future of FLO. Join our fast-paced and energetic team to develop next-gen sustainable plastics designed to enable circularity. Job Responsibilities Plan internal R&D initiatives and provide technical support in fundraising and IP development Lead, design, and direct experiments to synthesize, optimize, and characterize new polymer platform Lab operations and expansion Mentor and train junior scientists Build relationships with industry suppliers and distributors Background & Experience Ph.D. and/or 5 years of industry experience in scientific disciplines such as chemistry, materials science, chemical or process engineering, or related fields Expertise in organic polymer chemistry with an emphasis on synthetic methodology, process chemistry Experience with polymer formulation and material characterization, specifically working knowledge of various polymerization strategies (polycondensation, transesterification, RAFT, etc.) Hands-on experience using analytical methods to validate synthesis (HPLC, NMR, etc.) Compensation: We offer competitive salary as well as health and life benefits.